Against All Odds: The Penultimate Story of the Balkan Road Trip and Why My Yugo Matters

As loyal readers know by now, I bought a Yugo. It doesn’t drive. I own it solely as a piece of sculpture. I built it for no other purpose than to leave it there and make my foundry-cum-car-storage commune look like a Sarajevo housing project. I’ve since come to the conclusion that:

1) I need help

And

2) I look back nostalgically on the great Hobby 600 camper adventure of 2022.

One thing I’ve learned during my travels? Cars can be an important part of the landscape. Okay, maybe I already knew that. But the Balkans took that to another level, making that belief a part of my soul.

If you need a refresher, or have just stumbled upon this regular column of insanity, you can read all about it in this series. If you’d rather save the binge-reading for later, here’s the story: I quit my job as an engineer in Germany and went on an adventure with my wife and our Romanian street dog shelter (Luka). The three of us jumped into a 1993 Fiat Hobby 600 camper (also a rescue operation of sorts) and traveled through Southern Europe for 3 months. Hilarity ensued! But after moving back to the States and generating all sorts of other stories to tell, we parked the camper, effectively ending the series.

So where did we stop? Well, I hired the services of a metal worker on the east coast of Spain, and then, via the magical Balkan car battery and a possibly stolen mafia-run ship with Norwegian flags on it, we landed in Vlorë, Albania. There we managed to find my wife’s family in a mountain village. I became the temporary contract worker of the place, just like in my dreams, and after a few days of service, we smuggled our way to North Macedonia.

That last bit yielded a lot of fun stories, but for now let’s talk about my current state of communist car art.

The stories are relevant-ish, so everything will become clear. Like river water, maybe.

The day we entered North Macedonia was about two years ago, and it was an exhausting experience from the start. After being turned away at the eastern border crossing, at Lake Ohrid, we were sent back to Albania. I had spent almost two hours walking around Pogradec, looking for someone to sell me car insurance that would allow me to enter North Macedonia. (I already had insurance, but not, ahem, insurance. Read: Cash.) Finally I just said watch videos (never mind) and I decided to just drive to the border with North Macedonia, on the other side of the lake, to see what would happen.

We arrived at the very unfriendly looking Граничен премин „Ќафасан“ (Border Crossing Kafesan), a large communist-era administrative building with a considerable staff of stray dogs. Dozens of them. The traffic flow was similarly chaotic, with a fair number of abandoned vehicles littering the place. Were there Yugoslavs?you ask? No, not yet, but I’m getting there. Patience!

I pulled up to a tollbooth and told my wife, Dana, that it might be best to take a nap while I tried to figure out the situation. After receiving no attention at the gate, I entered the border building itself, wandering the linoleum and fluorescent-lit hallways of the complex until a tall, red-haired woman in a green wool suit stopped me.

“Entschuldigung – was machen Sie hier?” came the question. Damn, how did she know I spoke German? I was even more offended than if I had been asked what the hell I was doing in English.

In German, not one of our native languages, I explained the situation as best I could. Someone told me that I needed a special North Macedonian car insurance. (And then, in my head: God forbid I ever have to file a claim. To whom? And wouldn’t it all be my fault?) Finally, about an hour after I got in, I paid an exorbitant amount and woke Dana up with the rattling of the Iveco diesel engine in the camper.

We were on the road again and in a new country full of beautiful old vehicles. God knows I love a good Soviet military truck built under license in China, or a probably stolen W123 generation Benz with its 40th owner, so Albania required many time and patience consuming excursions off the route in the name of car photography. Crossing into North Macedonia, formerly Yugoslavia, the car scene became hugely more interesting. Old Zastava, TAM and Ladas were strewn across the landscape. Huge potential for lost productivity!

Clearly inspired by border control bureaucracy, Dana came up with a rule that was restrictive, but admittedly still generous to my shitbox-seeking tendencies. Rule as stated:

Rule 1, Section 1: At the entrance to each new country-sized area, three passes are given to allow the Hobby 600 to turn around or change route to inspect or photograph a vehicle(s).

Rule 1, Section 2: Unused passes will not be transferred to adjacent areas and will not be reset upon intentional or accidental re-entry into the previously mentioned area.

Rule 1, Section 3: If a vehicle is spotted directly en route and is accessible without There are no limits set when changing the current direction of travel.

It had already been a long day, so I did not challenge the regime’s new decree.

Less than twenty kilometers after the policy was implemented, I was faced with my first rule going into effect, and My girl it was a big one! A pile—literally a hill—of communist cars roared past my window. All brain function stopped. I nearly choked on one of my breakfast sardines. As my brain grew hungry for oxygen, it wondered if it was worth cashing in on one of my three allotted stops… and pondered the issue for about 5 miles. “I think we should go back…” I said shyly, testing the boundaries of what was reasonable within the new legal framework.

The regime granted my request.

The Hobby camper creaked in the potholed driveway of a garage directly across from a local branch of the North Macedonian Ministry of Forestry. Had these cars just been pulled out of the forest? Had they been abandoned after the Yugoslavian breakup and turned into some beautiful monument? I had so many questions and so little knowledge of the local language. I tried to gather my courage and memorize a few phrases from my phone, and eventually walked up to two gentlemen pushing a Lada Niva.

Me: Zdravo! is an American! (there I forgot everything and started rattling cars and pointing in different directions) Zastava, Lada, Yugo, Polonez!

Forest service man: Americanski! uhhh…Polonez?! (the two men look at each other and start laughing)

Me: UAZ (tapping on hood)! Niva (banging on door)! I got Moskvich!

Forest Service Representatives: confused shaking of heads

Me: uhhhhhhh…camera pictures?!

Ranger No. 1: Sure.

Me: Hvala (wrong Yugoslav language) really bad!

The cars were piled up so haphazardly that it raised endless questions about how and why they had gotten there. The Jenga-like way they were stacked made removing parts far too risky, at least for me, but probably not for the locals. Although they looked badly wrecked, none of them really looked like they had been “driven hard and put away wet,” like most of the Yugos still on the road in the Balkans. Were these cars simply thrown on a pile when the Western competition entered the market? No matter how I asked, there would be no way to have the Q&A session I so desperately wanted. The best thing to do would be to just smile, wave, and hit the road.

Although I stopped using turnaround passes in North Macedonia, our adventures didn’t end there. I bought some Hella driving lights at a flea market, plus a mysterious cure-all tincture from some homeless people in a Kia Pride, and then we spent the night in a winery parking lot. We made friends and ended up leaving the next day with several bottles of homemade Raki.

All this nostalgia boils down to this: That stupid Yugo in my backyard in America takes me back to all our wild experiences every time I see it. So even if it never runs, who cares? $300 well spent, I say.